This invention relates generally to soil sampling and more particularly relates to automated soil sample collection machines that are mounted on a mobile support frame, such as a trailer, and towed across an agricultural field to collect multiple soil samples from multiple locations in the field.
As agriculture has become increasingly technically sophisticated, the collection of accurate data has become increasingly important to farmers. One source of useful data is the composition of the nutrients and other materials in the soil. Soil composition data assists the farmer in determining the particular materials and their concentration that are appropriate to add to the soil.
Agricultural fields usually consist of a top soil layer that is a mixture of relatively fine particles covered by a layer of debris such as cover crops and the leaves and stalks that remained after the harvest from the previous season. Because the seeds that are to be planted in the upcoming season grow root systems that rely on the soil layer for healthy growth and not on the debris layer, soil samples are more accurately analyzed if the soil samples do not include constituents from the debris layer. However, soil samples are commonly taken by plunging a hollow soil sampling probe down into the soil to retrieve a cylindrical core sample. Consequently, such soil samples include any of the debris layer components that lie on top of the soil above the cylindrical core sample. As a result, those debris layer components become mixed into the soil sample and are then included in the analysis results. Since the debris layer components are not a useful part of the soil, their inclusion in the soil sample causes inaccuracies in the analysis data.
It is therefore an object and feature of the invention to improve the accuracy of soil sampling analysis by eliminating the surface debris from the soil samples by removing the surface debris before the soil sample is collected by a soil sampling probe.